Yes. Upcoming release has improved iquery with shell-like interface. It still pretty simple, but some readline handy features like history, history-search and some iquery’s helper commands implemented. I think in the future iquery will be more powerful.

If what you want is a C/C++ API, SciDB has one of those too. It’s the same one we used to build iquery. It’s primitive, but there isn’t a standard to follow in this space (except for things like NetCDF/HDF, etc) so we’re going to keep it as small and simple as we can.

Oh. Note that quantile() operator? That’s not something that will ship with SciDB by default. If you need something like that, talk to us.